WARNING:
The opinions expressed and linked to in this blog are not necessarily mine (anymore).

My ideas are constantly changing as I learn. Sometimes they even change midway through writing a post.

Monday, July 21

New Taking Children Seriously blog I am very curious to see how the new Taking Children Seriously blog turns out. I haven't managed to keep up with it, but from what I've skimmed, it looks good.

Why I don't actually read blogs much Personally, I prefer to be able to pick articles on a site according to subject (one reason why, although I write this blog for my amusement, I don't actually READ them much). I have figured out that if I skim a lot, I can skip right to subjects that interest me. Still, it would be a nice feature if they could be sorted by subject or indexed. The one blog I actually consistently read is Austin's. It's updated just infrequently enough that I can keep up with it and frequently enough that I don't often go to it only to find there are no updates. Also, I find his particular combination of style, variety of topics, and arrogance entertaining.

At first glance, I wondered how Austin could imply that the bus driver was arrogant.

It didn't occur to me at first that the driver, presuming that he "knew" the passengers didn't have a right to be on the bus before actually trying to understand their explanation was actually being very arrogant.

On the one hand, arrogance seems like it might be a great hindrance to one's growth of knowledge since less arrogant people might be inclined to withhold information and criticism. On the other hand, arrogance might gain one access to people and experiences that a less arrogant person might miss out on entirely.

I have written a few simple programs in Python. I like that I don't have to worry about semi-colons! (I have this tendency to leave them off).

I've also been spending a bit of time learning VI.

Why learn Vi?
-It's widely available (maybe the most widely available editor in Unix/Linux/Freebsd)
-Supposedly it has some very good advanced features. I do get frustrated with programs that won't let me format a document EXACTLY the way I want. We'll see how Vi does with this.

Some things I like about Vi so far:
-Being able to use keystrokes to do search and replace.
-Being able to use keystrokes to delete/copy/paste words, multiple words, lines at a time

Some annoying things about Vi so far:
-I have to remove my fingers from the home row to go into command mode to fix mistakes as I'm typing.
-Having to switch to command mode to erase a typo. There may be some easier way to do this, but I'm very accustomed to being able to just hit Backspace. For some reason Backspace doesn't seem to work consistently in Vi.
-I keep getting confused about what mode I'm in and either finding myself in a whole different part of the screen after accidently deleting some stuff or finding that I just typed a bunch of junk when I MEANT to be at the other part of the screen.

I'm hoping these are configurable things that I just haven't worked out yet. I suspect, though, that people may use Vi a lot differently than I'm accustomed to using Word.

One suggestion I've also had is to use Pico. Actually, I like Pico, but not all systems have it, and I don't know enough about Unix/Linux to easily download it.

I'm wondering whether Vim might have some of these annoyances worked out better too.